Not once, but twice after he supposedly discovered his online girlfriend of three years didn't exist, Notre Dame All-America linebacker Manti Te'o perpetuated the heartbreaking story about her death.

A review of news coverage found that the Heisman Trophy runner-up talked about his doomed love in a Web interview Dec. 8 and again in a newspaper interview published Dec. 10. He and the university said Wednesday that he learned Dec. 6 that it was all a hoax, that not only wasn't she dead, she wasn't real.

On Thursday, a day after Te'o's inspiring, playing-through-heartache story was exposed as a bizarre lie, Te'o and Notre Dame faced questions from sportswriters and fans about whether he really was duped, as he claimed, or whether he and the university were complicit in the hoax and misled the public, perhaps to improve his chances of winning the Heisman Trophy.

Yahoo sports columnist Dan Wetzel said the case has "left everyone wondering whether this was really the case of a naive football player done wrong by friends or a fabrication that has yet to play to its conclusion."

"Nothing about this story has been comprehensible, or logical, and that extends to what happens next," he wrote. "I cannot comprehend Manti Te'o saying anything that could make me believe he was a victim."

On Wednesday, Te'o and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said the player was drawn into a virtual romance with a woman who used the phony name Lennay Kekua, and was fooled into believing she died of leukemia in September. They said his only contact with the woman was via the Internet and telephone.

Te'o also lost his grandmother - for real - the same day his girlfriend supposedly died, and his role in leading Notre Dame to its best season in decades endeared him to fans and put him at the center of college football's biggest feel-good story of the year.

Relying on information provided by Te'o's family members, the South Bend Tribune reported in October that Te'o and Kekua first met, in person, in 2009 and that the two had gotten together in Hawaii, where Te'o grew up.

"We met just, ummmm, just she knew my cousin. And kind of saw me there so. Just kind of regular," he told Sports Illustrated.

Notre Dame said Te'o found out that Kekua was not a real person through a phone call he received Dec. 6. He told Notre Dame coaches about the situation Dec. 26.

A media review turned up two instances during that gap when Te'o mentioned Kekua in public.

Te'o was in New York for the Heisman presentation on Dec. 8, and during an interview before the ceremony, Te'o said: "I mean, I don't like cancer at all. I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer. So I've really tried to go to children's hospitals and see, you know, children."

In a column that first ran in the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 10, Te'o recounted why he played a few days after he found out Kekua died in September, and the day she was supposedly buried.

"She made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play," he said Dec. 9 while attending a ceremony in Newport Beach (Orange County) for the Lott Impact Awards.